question of terrible importance. He certainly meant something very
stern and awful. He seems to indicate also something final and
irrevocable. But there is absolutely no reason to believe that He
meant to convey the idea in our minds of a vast prison, in which the
souls of the lost are pierced through with agony for ever and ever.
You ask, How can I know what He meant? How could I know what
Shakespeare meant by a certain word? I should read up all the books
and letters of Shakespeare's times in which the word occurs, and
whatever it commonly meant to the people of Shakespeare's time I should
accept as being what Shakespeare meant. That looks sensible, does it
not? Well, a very interesting investigation has been made by various
scholars. They have examined all the existing Jewish writings where
the word Gehenna was used from 300 B. C. to 300 A. D. Then they have
examined the Jewish Talmuds which run on to the fourth and fifth
century. A modern English scholar, Dr. Dewes, says (_Plea for a New
Translation_, p. 23): "Every passage has been carefully examined which
is quoted in the works of Lightfoot, Schoetgen, Buxtorf, Castell,
Schindler, Glass, Bartoloccius, Ugalino and Nork, and the result of the
whole examination is this: _there are only two passages which even a
superficial reader could consider to be corroborative of the assertion
that the Jews understood Gehenna to be a place of everlasting torment_."

I give a few specimens from the Talmuds. "Gehenna is ordained of old
because of sins." "The ungodly will be judged in Gehenna _against the
day of judgment_." "The ungodly shall be judged in Gehenna _until the
righteous shall say of them, We have seen enough_." "The judgment of
the ungodly is for twelve months." "Gehenna is nothing but a day in
which the impious will be burned." "The sinners ... shall descend into
Gehenna; at the end of twelve months the body shall be consumed and the
soul burned up and the wind shall scatter it under the feet of the
just."

The reader sees, of course, that the vague Jewish opinions have no
authority for us except to help us to get at the meaning of our Lord
when speaking to Jews about Gehenna. We may assume that He used their
familiar word in the sense in which they would naturally understand it.
They certainly would understand Him to proclaim some terrible doom,
probably also an irrevocable doom. But can any one affirm that they
must have understood Him to mean endle